by Nina Revoyr
"Your dad and Raina's mom seem real happy," she said.
I turned to her. "For real?"
She looked surprised. "Yeah, don't you think so? Your dad seems calmer or something. I mean, he seems like giddy and everything, but at the same time more relaxed. So what's Raina's mom like, anyway?"
"I don't really know," I said truthfully. "Nice. Real serious. She doesn't smile that much."
Telisa nodded thoughtfully. "I can see that. She's not as intense as Raina, though. Maybe she has less to prove."
"Maybe," I said. "But I'll be able to tell you more in a couple of months." I opened the door. "Hey, thanks for the burrito."
"Anytime, homegirl," she answered, and I watched her walk out to her car. As she started up the engine and drove away, I thought about what she'd said. She was right. My father was more relaxed—less frantic, less talkative, more at ease with himself. But I hadn't really noticed these things until she'd brought them up. Because I'd never seen my father in a good relationship before, I had no way of recognizing that he'd finally found one. And besides that, I was feeling a bit removed—after the first couple of weeks of rubbing up against the other members of the household, I'd shrunk back into myself, and watched them from a distance. This, I understood, had something to do with why it wasn't harder for me to adjust to the new living situation. I felt safe in this position, in control of myself, hidden where no one could find me.
CHAPTER 3
A couple of days later, I arrived home from school to hear the chatter of the television coming out of the living room. I was carrying recruiting letters that had come in the day's mail—it seemed that the college coaches, without being told, had immediately caught on that Raina had moved, while her high school was still in the dark. By senior year, I barely glanced at most of the letters that arrived, but two years before, when I'd first started receiving them, I'd rushed home every afternoon to check the mailbox. I'd loved getting letters; and later, getting phone calls; and knowing that the unsmiling, note-taking scouts in the stands were usually there to watch me. It had been like winning the lottery, or being discovered: it was the closest I could get to being a movie star. Soon I, like many other recruits, had bought a cheap cardboard file box to keep track of my mail. I'd alphabetized the file and looked through its contents every week. Bright, multicolored school mascots appeared on some of the envelopes; on others there was just the university's name, printed in black or blue ink. The paper of both the envelopes and the letters was thick, textured, usually white or beige. It was the highest-quality paper I'd ever touched or even seen, and it reeked of prestige and importance. Recruits were special, and we knew it. Other kids applied to the colleges they wanted to attend. But colleges applied to us.
On that particular afternoon there were three letters for Raina and two for me. I separated them and walked into the living room, where I found Raina parked in front of the TV set with her high-tops and socks in a sweaty pile on the carpet. She was massaging her right thigh, and I watched the motion of her hands, which were gathering the flesh, and kneading it, like dough. Her knees were bruised and scarred from years of falling on pavement. To me they were like an intricate map of mysterious ridges and valleys, a geographical testimony to her devotion.
"Hey," she said, looking up at me, her mouth full of cookies.
"Hey. How was practice?" The season hadn't officially started yet, but both of our teams had been playing informally during sixth-period PE.
"Good," she said, turning back to Oprah. "We talked about you today."
"About me?"
"Well, actually, about your whole team. But especially you. About how we'd shut you down if we ever had to play you." She grinned wickedly, encouraging me, I knew, to brag about how thoroughly we'd kick their asses. They were in a different league, though, so there wasn't much chance we'd face them, unless we met them in a tournament, or in the playoffs.
"Well, if you ever did end up playing us, would you be the one to guard me?"
"Sure, why not? It worked okay that one time in summer league."
I laughed. "Ouch. Bitch. Tell your coach you got no business guarding me. I'm a forward."
"No way," she said. "'Course, the best way for us to take you out the game would be to fix it so that you guard me."
I smiled and tossed the letters at her, ignoring her references to the one time we'd played each other, in a summer league game—a contest in which I'd held her to only ten points, but had been so intent on stopping her that I'd only scored four myself. I was feeling good. This pseudo-arrogant banter reflected a sense of ease I was glad we could simulate if not really feel. Raina had been talking to me more in the last few days—not because she was giving me any special attention, but simply because she was friendly, and I was there. I wasn't entirely happy about not having the house to myself; the hours between when I got home from school and when my father did had always been my favorite part of the day. But losing some alone time in exchange for spending afternoons with Raina now seemed like a pretty fair trade. I didn't know what she thought about being there—after all, she was now sleeping a room away from someone who wanted her, and whom she didn't want. Besides, she was an only child too, and attached to her privacy. But maybe it was all right for her. Maybe she'd created such a space around herself that it protected her wherever she went.
After we'd rested awhile, we left for the park. Raina wanted to take the roundabout way; we'd been going on dribbling tours of Inglewood so she could familiarize herself with the area. That day we reached Victoria and headed north, the opposite direction from where we needed to go. I didn't mind this little detour; we could have walked through the most boring stretch of desert together and it would have been fine with me. The weather was beautiful that afternoon—there were a few high tufts of cloud that looked like rows of stretched-out cotton, and the sun felt good against my skin. Every once in a while there was a strong breeze from the east, and the palm trees that lined the sidewalk all bent toward the west, as if bowing to the ocean. All down the block, women sat on doorsteps and watched children play in balding front yards. It was September, the first month after another long, rainless Los Angeles summer, and what little grass there was in these yards was brown, dry, and coarse.
Raina and I exchanged hellos with the mothers and walked slowly in the cooling air. Ahead of us a garbage truck positioned itself in front of a large blue trash bin, which was overflowing with stained paper bags and crushed beer and soda cans. The truck extended its two metal arms, hooked onto the bin, and reverse slam-dunked the garbage into the trash compactor behind the driver's cabin. "Two points," said Raina, nodding. She was wearing a new USC shirt that Toni had given her, minus the sleeves she'd ripped off, and those long, baggy shorts made popular by a third-year guard for the Chicago Bulls named Michael Jordan. I was wearing the orange shirt I'd gotten for being named to the all-camp team a month earlier at Blue Star. We were both dribbling basketballs—mine an old outdoor ball brown and smooth from years of constant use, hers a still orange and shiny indoor ball, "borrowed" from a camp, that she was in the process of destroying by subjecting it to concrete. Her shoes she was more careful about. We'd both changed into outdoor pairs, so designated not because they were made for that purpose, but because we'd come to use them as such. It didn't matter that the bottoms of these particular pairs had been worn smooth as glass and were no longer suitable for indoor use, because basketball shoes, at least for us recruit types, were in no short supply. We were bombarded with them; we received them from camps, from leagues, on AAU teams, and even sometimes as awards. Not including the ones I'd given away, I had nine pairs myself: my practice pair, my outdoor pair, my home game pair, my away game pair, even a pair I wore as boots on rainy days (basketball shoes make great rain boots because they're so high and thick and insulated). After Raina moved in we took our combined supply of shoes and formed a huge, haphazard white mountain of them in the hall closet. Sometimes it took us five minutes or so to find a matching pair.<
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As we reached the first corner, Raina hit me on the shoulder with the back of her hand. "Yo, Nance, check out that house," she said, gesturing in front of us and grinning. She stepped off the curb and I grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out of the path of an oncoming car. "Check it out," she said again, barely seeming to notice.
I looked up and saw the house she was referring to, which was unabashedly hot pink, and hard to look at. I'd passed it so often that I didn't notice it anymore, but now, through Raina's eyes, and with the help of the summer sunlight, I was struck once again by its glory. "It's beautiful, don't you think?" I said. "I wish our house was that color."
Raina nodded. "If the Ku Klux Klan wore sheets that color, we'd all be a lot better off."
I turned to look at her. "Why?"
"If they had to wear hot pink instead of white, they'd be too embarrassed to come outside."
I stopped dribbling and shook my head. She saw the look on my face and laughed out loud, her eyes turning up toward the sky. This didn't surprise me—when Raina laughed, she always looked away. Other people, myself included, made eye contact with people when they laughed—either to show their appreciation of the funny thing that was said, or simply to enjoy the moment with someone. With Raina, though, it was different—almost like she could only enjoy the moment if she didn't share it with anyone else. She threw her head back and laughed as loudly as the next person, but with her face turned, her eyes averted. As if everything were meant to be experienced alone.
We kept walking, Raina commenting now and then upon a peculiar house, an interesting car, the smog-tinged view of downtown. The neighborhood was still new to her, and the interest with which she viewed it made me see things I hadn't noticed in years. Our block, and the several blocks around it, looked roughly the same. Most of the houses were one-story and small, but there were a few two-story houses scattered here and there, and several four- or six-unit apartments. All of the buildings were stuccoed in deceptively cheerful colors, but if you looked closely, you could see spots where the paint was flaking off like dead skin, and an occasional gaping white hole in the walls. Many of the houses sat behind short chain-link fences, and a few of them had red Spanish-style roofs. Their doors and windows were covered with bars, most of which were black, but some of which were white and decorated with metal flowers, as if design could disguise their function. Several of the properties had For Sale signs on their lawns; the signs usually stayed there for a year or two before the landlord or the family who lived there gave up and finally took them down. A generation earlier, those properties would have sold in a matter of weeks, and there were still suggestions of what the neighborhood had once been—a pleasantly lower-middle-class community with no frills and no wasted expenditure. Now, though, it showed the effects of twenty years of deterioration—like many of the people who lived in it, the 'hood seemed to have let itself go, to have given up. It hurt me to see this—it was like living with a friend whose health was failing right before my eyes. But the same thing was happening, in varying degrees, all over the city. The old, majestic Victorian houses of the Westlake district now seemed stooped over, like withered old men. In Watts, where my father had grown up, the half-demolished stores and collapsing houses made the area look like it had been bombed.
"Hey," Raina said suddenly, "y'all ever been robbed or anything?"
I nodded. "My dad's car got stolen once a couple years ago. That's why he's driving the Mustang now—he thinks it's less tempting than the Toyota he had before."
"But no one's ever, like, broken into your house?"
"Nope," I said, bouncing the ball between my legs. "But it happens pretty often, though. You gotta be careful. One time a couple years ago, the same guys broke into three different houses by crawling into the second-floor bathrooms. That's why my dad put bars on all the upstairs windows. Used to be we just had 'em downstairs."
"Our apartment got broken into twice," Raina said. Her old neighborhood, in Hawthorne, was similar to ours. "I think maybe that's why my mom wanted us to move in with you guys."
I turned to face her. "You mean it wasn't because of her burning need to be near my dad all the time?"
"Oh, well, yeah," Raina said, smiling. "That too." She bounced her ball, looked thoughtful. "You know, I like your dad. I was kinda suspicious of him at first, but he's all right."
"Why were you suspicious?"
"I'm suspicious of all men who wanna get close to my mom."
"I'm suspicious of all women who wanna get close to my dad too. But I like your mom. She's nice."
Raina shook her head distractedly. "Yeah, your dad's a trip, man. He's pretty damn funny sometimes."
I nodded, feeling strangely jealous. Suddenly I wasn't worried that Raina thought badly of my father, but instead, that she found me boring in comparison.
We continued along Victoria, picking up our basketballs as the street began to slope downhill. At Florence Avenue, which ran east and west, we waited for a clump of traffic to pass before jaywalking to the other side. The land leveled off there, and we resumed our dribble, walking along in silence for a block and a half.
"Check out that car," Raina finally said, pointing toward an old Buick that was parked on a lawn. There were a lot of cars parked on lawns here, behind chain-link fences; most of them were old and American, and they looked like big dogs cooped up in people's front yards. A couple of elementary school kids were sitting in the front seat of the Buick; Raina waved at them, and nodded. "It'd be better than a playground," she said. "Except that parents ain't gonna come outside and drive a playground to the store."
I nodded, but didn't say anything. I pictured a playground pulling free from the earth, sprouting wheels, and driving away.
"Although you never know," she continued. "When the Big One hits, all kinds of stuff is gonna come loose. It'll be great. We could bring Griffith Park closer to Inglewood, you know, and put the Sports Arena in the parking lot right next to the Forum."
I smiled. "What about the beach?"
She looked thoughtful. "The beach'll still be there. And we'll have another one, to the east of us, probably around Blythe or something. 'Cos you know, when the Big One hits, California'll be all right, but the rest of the country's gonna fall into the ocean."
"You," I said, laughing, "are strange." And she was, I was finding—strange, and not eager to hide it. I liked the way her mind worked, though—she put disparate elements together; she envisioned things that other people would never come up with. This was part of why, I realized, she was so much fun to spend time with. It probably also accounted for some of her success on the court, since Raina saw possibilities where a less creative player would have seen nothing. Her oddness surprised me, but also, somehow, made me feel closer to her; I thought that by sharing it with me, she was revealing something, even though it must have been there all along.
We were in the Hyde Park section of Los Angeles now, just a few blocks away from our house, but the difference between the two areas was obvious. The cars here were older and sputtered more loudly. The houses stood closer together. The pavement was more brittle and cracked, and the oil stains seemed fresher and larger; there was garbage all over the street and sidewalk. Graffiti seemed to cover every inch of the walls—the graffiti in our 'hood was much more sparse—and all of the houses, garages, and apartment buildings were more dilapidated, broken-looking, crumbled. Old metal objects—bikes, broken fans, scratched-up card tables and chairs—sat rusting on crooked front porches. People hung their clothes outside to dry, and on that day, which was so warm and beautiful, with just a bit of a breeze, it seemed like every other house had clothes and linens draped over the fences, as if their residents were waving white flags at the world.
As we walked, an ice cream truck rolled by us, playing a loud, cheerful tune; its sides and back were covered with graffiti. Several small children passed us and chased it down the street, and finally it pulled over to the curb. We turned the corner, still smiling at the kids
and their ice cream, and almost bumped into a young couple who were arguing on the sidewalk. The guy was wearing baggy shorts like Raina's and a Lakers cap turned backward.
He was gesturing widely with his hands, and the girl, who was wearing a yellow tank top and white Bermuda shorts, wagged a finger in his face with one hand and held a baby with the other. Despite the expansiveness of their movements, they kept their voices low, not wanting the neighborhood to know their business. They stopped talking for a moment as we walked past them, and I looked into their faces, nodded, saw that they were younger than we.
"Young love," Raina said when we were out of earshot. I turned back to look at them, and they were hugging now, the boy enveloping the girl and the child in his long arms. Raina had seen them too, and she seemed happy with this conclusion. I loved watching Raina as she noticed things. She took a genuine delight in the world around her; she engaged it and entered it without hesitation, in a way that I could only imagine. She simply went with whatever happened to catch her eye or her mind, and sometimes this resulted in her doing something dangerous or out of context—like introducing herself to me in the middle of a close game, or wandering out in front of a car.
At Crenshaw, we turned right and headed south toward the park. A few minutes later we reached Manchester Boulevard. Inglewood High School—my base of operations—was on Manchester, as was the Forum, a half a mile to the east. Whenever there were Laker games, the boulevard swelled with the fancy cars of people who were headed toward the Forum, people talking on their car phones to feel connected to the outside world, driving east from the 405 freeway, or west from the 110. The Forum, which was the home of the Lakers and the Kings and which also hosted the occasional concert, was like a big magnet that pulled white people into Inglewood. As soon as the event was over, though, the magnet's power wore off, and they got out of there as fast as they could.